Koby’s Comments

It seems to me that a number of nations have wished to cultivate a tech sector, similar to the U.S. and Silicon Valley. But despite their best efforts and a lot of subsidies and planning, it hasn't happened. While in the past, several European countries have excelled at technological developments, they seem to be poorly equipped for the Internet Age. Computer development requires free speech, and it doesn't appear that all nations realize that yet.

>>And it's worth reminding everyone considering supporting this bill that its words can cut both ways. Just because today we're talking about a topic a person on one end of the political spectrum cares about doesn't mean the other end can't use this law to force their views on campus in the same way.

Many people actually want it to cut both ways. Conservative ideas are currently being censored. But if the shoe ever goes on the other foot, then leftist speech ought not be censored or shut down by rioting either.

By the way, this isn't forcing views on the campus, this bill prevents the University from forcing views upon the students. You have a very strange viewpoint that if a speaker is tolerated to speak, that you must therefore agree with the speaker.

"I'm not sure why it even bothers to mention that Trump himself is not a target of an investigation (or that Comey told him that three times)"

He bothers to mention it because the first thing liberals say (demonstrated to me by reading several other discussion boards within the past hour) is "I bet Comey was fired because the FBI is investigating Trump."

>>Huh? I'm still stumbling over "socialist communist" that I'm already having difficulty figuring out how parodying someone is proof of "actual malice and negligence."

It seems to be fashionable nowadays to equate Republicans with Nazis. Most modern Republicans abhor Nazi ideals, considering that Republicans are unabashedly capitalist. In case you didn't know, Nazi stands for nationalist SOCIALIST. It's essentially the opposite of what Republicans believe, and many believed in the 1940s that Nazis and Communists were closely aligned.

While this lawsuit is certainly ill-advised, it perhaps does bring up an interesting question: Can someone slander another person, if the slander makes no sense as parody, and still use the "oh I meant it to be parody" as a defense? If so, have we discovered a loophole by which anything can be claimed about anyone else? Simply create a second account, slap on a parody tag, and unlimited-spech away?

>>Executive orders and presidential directives are being issued without legal guidance or consultation with the agencies affected.

This is exactly why nothing "gets done" in Washington, because it will probably take 10 years to do studies and get buy-in and legal guidance from everyone and each stakeholder and department. Even assuming that he gets a second term, he will finally be able to act exactly two years after he's out of office. In the meantime, the bureaucracy will continue to spiral out of control.

Instead, Trump is running things like a corporation, with a chain of command. Everyone in Washington dreams of being some kind of policy-maker, but Trump is going to change this. Instead, certain people that Trump trusts will develop the policy, while everyone else carries out the directives. It's probably going to make a bunch of the career bureaucrats very unhappy.

It's tough for some authors to admit that a political opponent like Trump could do a better job of trashing these corporate trade agreements than their golden boy Obama. I'm hopeful Trump is going to prove that all sides of the political spectrum need to NOT elect the usual cronies during the primary process, which will result in far superior decisions being made than the usual career politicians, no matter who wins the November election.

Apparently, up to 18000 email hacking attempts is not an indication of a state-sponsored actor. It can be accomplished by a brother and sister duo according to Bloomberg News. Also, the two were capable of a much more sophisticated hacking method that involved a malware network, instead of just phishing.

If Amos Yee is granted asylum, it poses a potential loophole for immigration. That is, anyone who lives in a country with some kind of anti-free-speech laws can willingly violate those laws in a manner critical of their own government, hop on a plane, and force the United States to grand them indefinite legal status? Ought 4 billion+ people get an entry ticket into the USA?

The traditional media outlets have tried to position themselves as neutral and objective reporters; however, they are not, and a large segment of the population has now identified them as having a severe leftist bias. This is why the traditional media is in a downturn. It is also why Donald Trump appears to be continuing his twitter campaign.

Michael Wolff is largely correct, that if the traditional media wants to survive and not simply get bypassed by new formats, then they need to change back to the formala that led to their success. They need to ditch the front page editorials and TV personalities. "Just the facts, sir."

"At some point you have to wonder if CNN is actively trying to be this bad at what it does, or if CNN boss Jeff Zucker is a subversive artist of the highest order, working tirelessly to craft a crushing, satirical look at modern American intellectual dysfunction."

Note quite, CNN is just a leftist fraud masquerading as a news organization. It believes that it is functioning quite well.

And this story continued where the administration ultimately blamed the Benghazi attacks on an internet video for the next 2 weeks, and not that it was a coordinated terror attack. How do we deal with this bias? The job of the moderator is NOT to "fact check" or "take sides" on a debate. It is to get the opinions of the candidates. If one side or another has a problem with the candidate's response to a question, then the candidates can rebut it. If the moderator has a problem with a candidate's response, they can take issue with it afterwards. But definitely no "fact checking" during the debate, no matter how obvious you think it should be. Let the debaters debate.

Basically, some government workers are watching porn all day instead of doing their jobs, and amazingly their superiors are unable/unwilling to fire them. So someone who wrote the language of the spending bill has decided to introduce this anti-porn language as a mandate that either the government IT admins block porn, or else they don't get funding.

There are some people who get tattoos of a pistol on their hip. It can apparently look convincing at a distance and at night. Saying that charges are "common sense" doesn't make them common sense, since the situations faced by officers can sometimes be much more complex than you realize.

I too am confused as to exactly what they are proposing to do about "getting the money out of politics". What law do they think that they're going to pass in order to accomplish this? It sounds to me like they're soliciting donations prior to having a legislative platform, which usually attracts the most insidious politicians.

So a business is trying to claim fair use under copyright because it is a parody. But the problem isn't copyright, it's a trademark problem, which doesn't really have a parody exemption. But the business is trying to claim it isn't a business and that it's an art gallery, and that it's giving away its product for free, and it can therefore claim copyright fair use. In trying to predict what might happen if there is an actual court case, I would assume that the business is declared to be an business despite the way it wants to label itself, and that it violates the Starbucks trademark. However, all bets are off because it could be a false flag attack and we can't really trust judges to see through corporate shenanigans. Fascinating nonetheless because of the complexity!

Here, however, there was a twist. A licensee was the party that filed for a Declaratory Judgment, placing the licensor in a difficult situation since it apparently was not permitted to file a counterclaim alleging infringement since the license remained in effect (but the licensor was receiving no royalties since the licensee decided to pay them into an escrow account). In the panel's view this created a situation where an exception to the general rule seemed both appropriate and fair. It is not that they did not know the law (they did), but an exception was believed to be the better approach (much like Judge Leon in his recent NSA decision).

The licensor also put the licensee in a difficult situation by approaching them and claiming they infringed on their patents, so get a license or else. The licensee had a choice: either pay for the license or else risk a lawsuit. This was actually not such a difficult position for the licensor because their contract allowed the licensee to put the money into a escrow account and challenge the action in court. So the licensee was just following the contract! So who wins? The established case law STILL stands, that the patent holder has the burden of proof that there is infringement.

If Obama, upon entering office, learned from security briefings that he would immediately break his campaign promises, then the honorable thing to do would be for him to resign. But of course Obama is just a career politician. Anyone who believes that Obama has been shocked or outraged over any NSA wrongdoing is deceiving themselves: the only person to suffer any punishment, firing, or prosecution is Edward Snowden.